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Agriculture

From butter churns to diesel tractors, the Museum's agricultural artifacts trace the story of Americans who work the land. Agricultural tools and machinery in the collections range from a John Deere plow of the 1830s to 20th-century cultivators and harvesters. The Museum's holdings also include overalls, aprons, and sunbonnets; farm photographs; milk cans and food jars; handmade horse collars; and some 200 oral histories of farm men and women in the South. Prints in the collections show hundreds of scenes of rural life. The politics of agriculture are part of the story, too, told in materials related to farm workers' unions and a group of artifacts donated by the family of the labor leader Cesar Chavez.

Correspondence, extensive agricultural notes, photographs, maps, and a scrapbook from Adlard's time as a student at Lingnan University, China. His photographs, commentary, and notes on rural life in both China and the Philippines are detailed and insightful. Includes articles written by Adlard that were inspired by his time in the Orient, on Philippine cocoanut production, Chinese village life, the farmers of China, soybeans as food and pre-war China. Also includes Adlard's later articles for various publications and his correspondence with Julia Needham of the Troy-Bilt Owner News about Adlard's work with drip system irrigation and design as well as his use of Chinese farming practices in his own home garden. Includes some brief biographical information on Adlard, related gardening and agricultural pamphlets and two copies of the Garden Way Inc. publication, "Gardening Beyond the Plow." This collection is valuable in its view of rural China and the Philippines just prior to World War II and the domination of East Asia by Japan

Cite as

Richard Adlard Collection, Archives Center, National Museum of American History

Includes accounts of several employees of George B. and Sanford L. Treadwell of Mittineagus, Massachusetts, two written as small pieces of paper sewn between covers of calfskin. One volume is for 1861, one for 1862, and the other for 1863-1865

Cite as

Treadwell Account Books, 1861-1865, Archives Center, National Museum of American History. Gift of Madeleine Wilkinson